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The best things in Star Jones’ life are free, but a Manhattan gardener says she can give that to the birds and bees – he wants money.

In papers filed in Manhattan Civil Court, Dimitri’s Nurseries charges the living-large-on-the-cheap “The View” co-host stiffed them on a $7,189.20 bill for renovating her Upper East Side roof garden.

Gardening center owner Dimitri Gatanas said she did make a settlement offer – an autographed picture of herself posing in the roof garden for his office – but he turned the deal down.

“This is not a diner,” Gatanas said. “The money is something we need. This wasn’t charity for a church.”

Jones’s lawyer, Howard Mann, said the allegations in the suit, which was made public yesterday on The Smoking Gun Web site, are “not true.” He said that Jones has filed a countersuit against the gardener for doing shoddy, unlicensed work that damaged her roof and apartment.

Gatanas’ lawyer, Victor Muskin, called that charge “nonsensical.”

Jones herself sounded thrilled with her 1,400- square-foot roof garden last year, when she told Architectural Digest that, “Every time I come up here, I feel like the queen of New York.”

Gatanas said he’d originally agreed to “beautify” the $30,000 job he’d already done on her garden in return for Jones giving him credit for it in the magazine.

The magazine’s photo spread on what it described as her “unapologetically glamorous triplex apartment” with the garden where she spends “many an evening . . . sipping champagne under the stars” ran in October 2003, but Gatanas wasn’t mentioned.

“It’s like the Bible of the design world. It would have meant a lot of business,” he said.

Jones, 42, assured him the magazine would run a correction the next month, but it didn’t. Then he said she offered him the photo of herself.

Gatanas, who had an agreement he’d get paid if he didn’t get the mention, sent her a bill she never responded to, which led to the suit.